The present invention relates to the detection and analysis of audio recordings, in general, and to the detection and analysis of human audio recordings, in particular.
Listening to people conversing regardless of the contents of the conversation can be very informative regarding the state of mind the conversing parties are in. A speaker raising his voice significantly in comparison to normal manner of speech can indicate stress, anger or other exceptional inconvenience. Similarly, a speaker talking significantly slowly compared to normal can indicate some distress or fatigue of the conversing speaker. Eavesdropping, though invading the privacy of speakers, is performed for various reasons. One reason is for protecting society from suspected felons such as drug traffic, mass suicide assassins, etc. Another use for eavesdropping can be medical tracing of mentally ill patients. Eavesdropping for military purposes is probably the most widespread use made of eavesdropping. Military necessity for detailed information regarding the arsenal, ammunition and all military equipment as well as the need to acquire information regarding movements, concepts and thoughts of opponent armies and other defined elements led to the extensive use of eavesdropping as a legitimate tool for acquiring information. The extensive use of eavesdropping for military use provides a considerable amount of audio recordings. An audio recording received as such has little value prior to processing and extracting the information within the recording. Audio information extraction process can include a number of stages, a preliminary evaluation of the potential importance of information, a technical process that can include an audio replay and/or an audio replay providing enabling to inscribe the text in writing. The last stage includes the extraction of relevant information from the audio recording. Hence the process of extracting valuable information is time consuming and requires professional personnel. Infrequently when many hours of audio recordings accumulate not all recordings can be processed consequently valuable information is vanished. Furthermore, the duration of extraction of valuable information from audio recordings, also when not accumulated, can be critical. The situation of loss of valuable information due to the disability to process all audio recordings happens occasionally within military intelligence agencies responsible for eavesdropping. There is a growing need to prevent loss of valuable information concealed within unprocessed audio recording. Furthermore, there is need to evaluate on-line audio recordings for urgent purposes and for information of highly importance. There is a further need to provide an immediate alert when detecting an emergency situation or other urgent situation.
There is therefore a need in the art for a method and system for detection and analysis of audio recordings.